250 Words on Three Telescopes

[I try to start my day writing 250 words on anything. I’ll post one every Tuesday until I run out of good ones.]

When I was about 12, my parents bought me a telescope. It was a refractor, the type with a lens at the front—exactly what you envision when you hear the word “telescope.” It was a terrible optical instrument from K-Mart, worthless for looking at anything but the Moon. 

I think well-meaning folks do more harm than good when they buy their kids subpar hobby gear that only frustrates them. Investigate more and get better stuff. Still, I spent hours with it. 

In college, I hosted my campus’s public stargazing sessions with a reflecting telescope inside a little domed observatory. The scope’s tube was about 7 feet long, and I got so familiar with it that I could spin it around to point at a nebula or galaxy with my back turned to the sky. We did real research with it, and I spent many nights pushing both its and my capabilities, hunting for the dimmest deep-sky objects I could see. 

Also in college, I had a few opportunities to visit Lick Observatory, built atop Mt. Hamilton east of San Jose, California. Established in 1888, Lick is a historic institution, and its 36-inch (diameter) telescope looks like a gigantic steampunk hallucination. Viewing the M13 globular cluster through that eyepiece was a religious experience. It’s a dandelion puffball comprising half a million stars, and I swear I could see every one. 

I was awestruck. Dumbstruck. Thunderstruck. I’ve visited some sacred places, but Lick’s dome is the holiest temple I’ve ever entered.

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